Looking for positives in city schools’ news

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All the adults in the Rochester school district must feel as
if a black cloud is hanging over them - and that it keeps getting darker.

The latest graduation rate, released earlier this month, was
only 45.5 percent, the lowest among the state's largest cities.

The contentious relationship between the school board and
Superintendent Bolgen Vargas ended with Vargas leaving
his position at the end of December, six months before his contract ended. But
under his agreement with the board, he's staying on as a consultant, with pay,
until June.

Earlier this month Daniel Lowengard,
hired to be interim superintendent while the board looks for a new chief,
suffered a stroke - four days into the job. He won't be returning.

It would be good to feel that once we get past this, things
will settle down. And they will, of course. But I'm finding it increasingly
hard to be optimistic about the district's future. The challenges are simply
too great.

To repeat the obvious, the district's biggest challenge is
one it didn't create and cannot solve: concentrated poverty. It is not a
coincidence that the New York school district with the worst performance -
Rochester - is also the one with the highest poverty rate.

This community, helped by the State of New York, is
investing a lot of time and a bit of money crafting a plan to deal with that
poverty. But as the leaders of the Anti-Poverty Initiative themselves have
said, that won't happen overnight. Meantime, every year hundreds of new
children start school in Rochester, and hundreds more graduate or drop out
without the education they'll need to prosper.

The poverty itself gives the district a mind-numbing
challenge. Meanwhile, the school board must interview applicants and hire a new
superintendent, approve a budget, and support a replacement interim
superintendent who has deep experience in education but none of it in Rochester
and who was brought here to be chief of staff under Lowengard,
not to be in charge.

An additional challenge: the district is losing students.
Some families have moved to the suburbs, and often the reason was their lack of
faith in city schools. Other children have left to enroll in one of 13 charter
schools (and more charters are planned). Another 713 students are attending
suburban schools in the Urban-Suburban program, which expanded to 13 districts
this past year.

While creaming off the city's brightest, most motivated
students isn't the intent of charter schools and
Urban-Suburban, that's an unavoidable result. Motivated families are the ones
most likely to seek out alternative choices for their children. And the city is
left with the responsibility of educating the children with the biggest
challenges.

Not all of the district's developments are negative. Many
children are doing well. In addition, we have an opportunity to get some
important information, despite the current challenges - and in some cases, as a
result of them.

A big positive and a big learning opportunity is the district's
partnership with the University of Rochester, which is managing East High
School. If East's students do better under the UR's administration, we should
be able to determine what makes the difference. University officials have said
that the lessons from East will be important not just for Rochester but also
for urban districts around the country, and they're right. Rochester isn't
alone in this crisis.

We should also make
sure we're analyzing the results of Urban-Suburban and charter schools. If students
there do better than the students in the city's traditional public schools, we
should find out why, and we should act on what we learn.

There are opportunities, then, despite the bad news, but the
district and the entire community must take advantage of them. It's impossible
to overstate the importance of the district and its schools to the future of
Rochester's children, and to the future of the city.